1 comment:

So that 'broad-based' program didn't do much to improve educational outcomes. Did it hurt anything? If not, that suggests that whatever it replaced was not so bad or good either.

I wonder why, in all these interventions, they don't try teaching some specific, useful skills. Music is nice, foreign language is useful for a few people, but not most. Chess?

My wife grew up in Japan, and in that era, abacus training was all the rage, and she took after-school classes for years. Kids learned to calculate very rapidly and accurately. Even now, 40 years later, she can glance at a receipt and calculate in her head if the totals are correct. You can watch her jiggling her fingers as if sliding beads on an abacus while she mentally calculates. She also has a good feel for if numbers make sense at a glance.